Users of video-sharing app TikTok have now spent more than $10 billion on it – the first non-gaming app to break that spending barrier, new figures have revealed.
In all, TikTok users spent $3.8 billion through the app in 2023, a rise of 15% on the previous year and taking the total spent through the app past $10 billion in its lifetime, according to data from data.ai.
TikTok is the first non-gaming app to break the $10 billion barrier and only the fifth in all. The top earning mobile app in history is King/Activision’s Candy Crush Saga, which has earned more than $12 billion over the years. The others to make more than $10 billion are Tencent’s Honor of Kings ($11 billion), XFLAG/Mixi’s Monster Strike ($10.6 billion) and Clash of Clans from Supercell ($10.2 billion).
TikTok users can spend money in the app in a variety of ways including tipping creators that they like and buying products they see on it. Many TikTok creators make their money this way, or from taking a percentage of sales of products bought through links they share in their videos. Often this is through yellow buttons that appear at the bottom of a video and like to the TikTok Shop.
But while the other apps made their money quickly initially – TikTok took 101 months to break the $5 billion barrier, while the longest any of the others took was 69 months – they then slowed down as they reached saturation point. But TikTok took just 15 months to double its earnings from $5 billion (the fastest of the others was 35 months) as with the nature of its ever-changing content, users don’t have a saturation point as they have with a game.
It is believed that mobile app spending will continue to increase in 2024 as more people use apps such as TikTok and more creators harness ways to monetise their content.
